Chapter Text
V wakes to warmth at his back and a strong arm slung around his middle. Stubble tickles at his neck. A breath breaks across his ear as he shifts sleepily, settling into the comfortable weight behind him.
"Stay in bed, Nate…" Johnny's sleep-worn voice breaks the silence, and every muscle in V's body goes rigid.
V scrambles away and sits up where the wall meets the bed, ignoring Johnny's half-awake "what the fuck" grumblings as he stirs. V doesn't remember Johnny being in the apartment when he fell asleep. He'd given him a key weeks ago, but Johnny usually crashed on the couch if he arrived unannounced in the dead of night, and that still didn't explain…
"Where the hell am I?" Johnny groans. He rubs his forehead with the back of one hand while sitting up. "V?"
V watches Johnny like he's a live grenade. "What are you doing here, Johnny?" His voice is steely and clipped even as Johnny struggles to wake up.
"Fucking hell, man, what the fuck did I drink last night?" Johnny finally manages to lurch upright, curling in on himself with a wince. His hair falls around his face like a dark curtain, and he rubs at his eyes. "Last thing I remember is getting back from that Badlands job with you."
That job was a week ago. V remembers the payment transfer hitting and him immediately blowing it on a birthday gift for Misty. He remembers giving it to her.
"What else do you remember?"
Johnny bristles with irritation, scowling at V as he brushes his hair out of his face. "What the fuck is your problem? What's with the fucking interrogation?"
"How do you know that name?"
Johnny's voice rises to almost a shout. "What fucking name? What the fuck are you talking about?"
Anger surges up V's throat. He wants to scream, or cry, or beat Johnny to a bloody pulp. His jaw twitches. Johnny would take the first hit easily, at least, with how hungover he looks, but V keeps himself still and isolated to the far side of the bed. Wary silence stretches between them.
"Nate," V finally croaks. He clears his throat and feels the anger slowly leech out of him. "My husband."
Johnny either doesn't notice or doesn't care how thin it stretches V just to say that. He grunts as he flops out of bed and starts rummaging around for cigarettes. When he can't find a lighter, V just sighs and tosses him one. He grabs it from the edge of the mattress and perches there to light up.
"You're married?" Johnny asks incredulously.
"Was."
Johnny turns to look at him. V sits there limply, staring into nothing with a hollow look in his eye. His movements are mechanical, puppet-like when Johnny offers him his cigarette.
Neither of them speak. The apartment fills with the quiet hum of electronics, the ambient sound of the city. They swap the cigarette back and forth until it's burned down to the filter, and then Johnny lights another one. His hand lingers when he passes it to V.
He looks more composed, calmer, but there's venom in the way he looks at Johnny.
"Just ask," V snaps.
"What?"
"Just get it over with and ask me."
Johnny sighs. He glances furtively to the side.
"What happened?"
"Night City happened," V says, like that's any kind of answer at all.
But Johnny doesn't try to pick a fight about it. He just sits there and shares another cigarette with V.
"Is he…?" Johnny teeters on the end of the question with an unsteady hand gesture. Might as well get it over with, like V said.
"He's dead," V confirms. They sit there in grim silence for a moment before V hands back the cigarette and leaves the bed. He returns swigging whiskey from the bottle. They trade smoking and drinking for a while, until they're absentmindedly taking dry drags of the filter, and it's like that's the mental time limit V convinced himself of because he clears his throat and finally looks Johnny in the eye again.
"'Stay in bed, Nate,'" V stubs out the cigarette with a grimace and lights another one. "I used to say that to him, in the morning. He would have to wake up early for school. He wasn't a, uh, fuck-up like me." V's smile looks like a snarl as he jabs his thumb into his own chest. He gets up and starts tugging on clothes.
"What's the rush?" Johnny groans, sitting up just enough to neck the bottle. He scowls when V tosses his boots at him—whatever state he'd been in last night, he'd apparently been conscientious enough to leave them at the door.
"We're going to the doctor."
Johnny sighs hard, almost considers throwing the booze at V's head but instead takes a last swig and starts pulling himself together. If nothing else, he can probably sweet-talk his way into getting the good stuff for his hangover.
The walk to Vik's office is short and familiar. They hang out in Misty's shop while waiting on Vik to finish up on another patient, with V shooting Johnny a glare every time it looks like he might make a snide comment. Joke's on him, though—Johnny's head is pounding way too hard for him to bitch about Misty's hippie-dippie bullshit while V gets a tarot reading for the Nth time.
Johnny is all too glad to leave for Vik's office when the time comes. He tosses himself dramatically onto the exam chair with a groan. "Doc, get me a hangover cocktail, stat!" Johnny barks, slinging his arm over his forehead and casting shade across his aviators.
"I'm not your personal goddamn nurse," Vik grouses, but he's already sanitizing his hands, putting on gloves, and gathering together supplies for an IV drip that he hangs by Johnny's side. "Drop the arm."
"Just use the other one," grits out Johnny.
Vik huffs, but he wheels the IV stand to the other side and gently slides the needle home. He looks up at V from over his glasses with his practiced tortured glower. "Kid, you didn't come here just to dump Johnny on me, right?" Vik pleads. He turns to dispose of his gloves and doesn't see Johnny's middle finger pointed at his back.
V watches from Vik's desk, eyes crinkled with amusement. His smile wavers as Vik turns and levels him with a raised eyebrow.
"I want you to scan him," V points at Johnny. "Something's wrong with 'im."
"Fuck you," Johnny grumbles, knuckling his sunglasses up over his forehead to glare at V directly.
"Seems fine to me," says Vik drily.
"No, you don't understand. Neither of you understand," V sighs. He lights himself another cigarette. "I woke up, and Johnny was in my bed. Wasn't there when I fell asleep." Johnny scoffs in the background, but doesn't speak. "He said 'Stay in bed, Nate.' Just like how I used to. It was like being on the wrong side of a memory…"
An uncomfortable silence stretches between them. Vik speaks up first.
"I can run a scan, but I'm not really sure what—y'know, he clearly had a bit to drink last night. Is it all that strange that he shows up at your place?" Vik's expression is gentle, his arms folded over his chest with a thoughtful gesture toward his temple.
"No, that's not the point, Vik. That was my husband's name."
A discordant note strikes the empty space of their conversation.
"Oh, I didn't know you were married," Vik says carefully.
"Yeah, Vik, I know. I've never told anyone." V pauses. "So why is he saying his name, saying it like I did every morning?"
"Maybe you let it slip once or something, I don't fuckin' know!" Johnny snaps. "Why the hell are you freaking out about this?"
V glares at him. Johnny glares right back. But V just breaks eye contact and looks hard at Vik.
"He said the last thing he remembers is the Badlands job us two did. That was a week ago."
"Bullshit," growls Johnny. "We got back last night—" he stumbles over his words suddenly, blinking at the scattered fragments of memory trying to form a timeline. "We got caught in the dust storm?" Johnny squints. Pain lances through his brain like a gunshot, and he grimaces. "Fuck, what are you talking about?"
"Johnny, that was a week ago. A couple days before Misty's birthday. I haven't seen you again since today. Scan him, Vik."
They stare between each other like they're in a standoff. Johnny finally groans as he fidgets with his IV line.
"Fine, scan me. If it'll get you to stop freakin' out."
"Johnny, you're the one who lost a week. Don't you think you oughta be a little more concerned?!"
Vik sighs and leans back down to Johnny's side. "Quit playin' with that, Johnny," he grumbles, pulling the man's fingers away from the tape securing the cannula to his arm. "Boys, settle down. I'll run a diagnostic, alright? And then we'll see if we have anything to worry about."
V huffs around his cigarette, watches silently as Vik sits in his chair and reels out a line to connect to the port at Johnny's nape. Johnny grumbles but lets him jack in.
There's a few tense moments as data streams across their connection, lights up the diagnostic monitors by the exam chair. Vik frowns and scoots closer to one of the screens, flipping his glasses up over his forehead to squint at the readouts.
"What's the news, doc?" Johnny and V say simultaneously before glaring daggers at each other.
"Well, there's no news, not really. You're… fine." Vik leans away from the display and pinches the bridge of his nose. "You're great, actually. Perfectly healthy. There's no indication you should even be hungover."
"Well that's a fat sack of fucking shit, I feel like hell," Johnny growls.
"I know, kiddo," sighs Vik with a patronizing pat on Johnny's shoulder. "That's the weird thing. There's nothing 'wrong' with you that my tools can sniff out." He leans back in his chair and watches the readings tick by.
"Well run it again," V says as he crosses the room to take a look at the monitors himself. The readings are familiar and yet not—not formatted the typical way he sees as a netrunner, but he can interpret it enough to believe what Vik's saying, even if he'd prefer not to.
"I ran it three times, V. Same every time."
V's hand is locked into a fist, like he's thinking about putting it through Vik's diagnostic displays. His jaw twitches. He ends up turning away to stub out his cigarette into the ashtray on Vik's desk, crushing it with his thumb until it crumples in the old ashes. "So what do we do about this?"
"Y'know, it's nice to always be a 'problem' you gotta 'deal with,'" Johnny sneers. He starts getting up, tugging at the diagnostic cable and IV until Vik makes a pained noise and pushes him back down into the chair.
"Quit that, let me do it," Vik grumbles, fussing with Johnny until he's settled again and letting the doctor work.
Vik shoots a look at V as he carefully slides the needle out of Johnny's arm and bandages the injection site. "V, I'm a ripperdoc. Not a neurologist, or a netrunner, or whatever it is you need to suss this out. I can give you… an educated guess, maybe, based on what we learned about the relic back when all this started." He glances furtively back at Johnny. "I mean, by the end, you worked with the relic more than I ever did. But did you ever think that maybe it worked both ways?"
"You two have fun with all that bullshit." Johnny staggers up to his full height and slips his shades back on. "Gonna blow my brains out if I gotta hear another second of it."
"Fine. Run along, Johnny," V looks distracted, analyzing something through his optic implants that makes his brow furrow.
"What? Just gonna let me leave?" Johnny spreads his hands wide, backing his way to the clinic door.
"If I need you, I'll find you." V's eyes flicker back to alertness, leveling Johnny with a stare that makes him not want to turn around, to not turn his back at all until he's out of sight.
He turns anyway, defiant even to himself, and stomps back up the steps and out to the alley. All that follows his back is the muffled conversation from the clinic starting up again.
"So what do we do about this?" V repeats, arms folded over his chest.
Vik sighs. "Might not be anything to do about it, V. He's his own man, now. In his own body. Like I said, there's nothing my scans can pick up on. But I'll save the results… just in case." He starts putting his things away, prepping for his next patient. "And it really could be nothing. You two were sharing a brain for a long time. No telling what the mind does, in circumstances like that, even a digital one. Wouldn't be the first time Johnny showed up after a week-long bender, either." Vik finishes wiping down the exam chair, then glances at his watch and sighs. "Now, not to kick you out, kid, but I got a three o'clock."
"Right, yeah," V says haltingly, distracted and faraway as the look in his eyes. He collects himself as his focus reemerges, takes his time walking to the door. "Order whatever you want for dinner later on my tab. See you, Vik."
Moments after V leaves, a payment notification lights up Vik's phone for some exorbitant amount that makes him scoff and shake his head—not that he declines it.
–-
V almost forgets about that day, that day when Johnny woke him up as if possessed by the ghost of his former self. Neither of them has mentioned it for months. They return to their pattern of violence, sex, and bickering. Things are—or at least feel—normal.
The weight on the bed is what he notices first, until it rolls over to slot in against his back and Johnny's familiar scent hits V's nose, cigarettes and liquor and tangy musk.
"The hell've you been, Johnny?" V rasps. He hasn't seen Johnny in a week or more, and almost started worrying about it.
Johnny laughs, and there's something strange about how it sounds. "Who the hell is Johnny? Should I be worried?"
V's not sure right away why Johnny's voice is making his skin crawl. But it dawns on him in those moments of earnest, confused silence, makes his eyes snap open and his body tense up. Something in the way Johnny talks echoes eerily familiar, like the feeling of V's own voice rumbling through his chest. Not as if Johnny were imitating a sound recording of V's voice, but like he inhabited every breath and movement and contraction of V's body used to create its exact cadence and timbre.
V shoves Johnny away abruptly, every cell inside him screaming to leave like touching Johnny again would set off an atomic bomb. He turns to see him sleepy and confused, infuriatingly innocent in the dumb way he blinks.
"Where the hell am I? V?"